Week after week the language-and-literacy pontificators fulminate in newspapers and magazines, nearly always revealing how little they know about language. The worst case I've seen in the past week is a column by Howard Jacobson in The Independent about how old teaching methods worked and new ones don't (muted thanks to Steve Jones for pointing it out to me). In the column he foams at the mouth over a contestant on a reality show who did not understand the meaning of the idiomatic phrase at your peril. Peril means "danger", of course but is somewhat archaic. Proceed at your peril means "If you proceed you will be in danger", but crucially, this is not compositional: the meaning does not follow from the regular principles for the rest of English phrase semantics. For example, you can't say ??Proceed at your trouble to mean "If you proceed you will be in trouble"; you can't say ??Proceed at your error to mean "If you proceed you will be in error". At your peril is a fixed phrase you have to learn as a whole. It is insane to whinge about the whole educational system going to the dogs just because one young person didn't know this single idiom. Everyone is ignorant of at least some of the abundantly many idiomatic phrases in English. And apart from that one phrase, Jacobson's complaints about education rest entirely on two things: a teacher named Phil Beadle used the transitive verb lay to mean "lie" ("be recumbent") in a TV program (see my disastrously unhelpful guidance on Language Log about this supposed shibboleth), and practice (rather than practise) was used as a verb in the program's closing credits (there's nothing wrong with it: dictionaries list it as a variant spelling, but Jacobson is too stupid or too over-confident to look at dictionaries). What a pathetic basis for apocalyptic claims about modern education. Read this linguistically ignorant blithering windbag at your peril.

38 Comments

D Jagannathan said,

I can see him on a street corner with an A-Frame proclaiming the decline of society as we know it.

I should add, though, that "at your peril" is matched by the similar, perhaps more common "at your (own) risk." Other non-locative (and thus, I take it, non-compositional in your sense) 'at your' phrases like "at your service", "at your expense" seem to fall into another class.

The weird rule about practice and practise was drummed into me in Primary School not that long ago (1998). We were told that using practice-with-a-c-as-a-verb was a very American thing to do, explaining his huffy "in this country" remark.

Christopher Stone said,

I did a search for proceed on google as well, and I was interested to see how often the word 'pace' shows up with proceed (a search for "proceed at" +pace yields 275,000 results out of a little more than a million hits for "proceed at"):proceed at snail's paceproceed at a measured paceproceed at a considerably slower paceproceed at a pace faster than even Rooseveltproceed at the same pace as until now

And then there are others that I suppose are related to the 'at your own pace' one in that they have the sense of rate of speed, but don't actually use the word 'pace':proceed at a normal rateproceed at a increasing and more productive rateProceed At Full Speed

And here are two that seem to be compositional:proceed at room temperature (This one makes sense if you take into account that it was talking about chemical reactions, or at least it does to me)proceed at obtaining records from Barnardos (I have to say, this one sounds pretty strange to me, but I also found it on a British site. Any Brits care to weigh in on this one?)

Justin L said,

One question–how many of these "at (your) X" phrases are borrowings or calques of French expressions? A quick search turned up "procéder/avancer à votre loisir," "procéder/avancer à volonté" and "procéder/avancer à vos risques et périls".

I don't know when these expressions were first used in English, but most of the individual words were borrowed during the Norman Invasion, and it seems possible that a handful of expressions (maybe used in law?) entered alongside the vocabulary. However, the phrasing never became truly productive in English except with terms of speed, leaving us with a few formulaic phrases.

"At your peril" may not be compositional, but I would argue that anybody who understands what "peril" means should be able to successfully interpret the idiom nonetheless.

What strikes me as ridiculous about Jacobson's article is that I don't see any reason to conclude that the young person in question misconstrued the expression at all!. Apparently, upon hearing that she should proceed "at her peril", the young woman thought for a while, then smiled sweetly and thanked the speaker. How does that imply a failure to understand the idiom? Could she not simply have meant "Thank you for the warning, I'll take it to heart."?

Stephen Jones said,

Actually when we do look up the usage in the British National Corpus of practice/practise the result is quite bizarre.

When we look up the infinitive 'to practice' we find 196 examples compared to 566 for the more common 'to practise'. Most of the 196 examples are of the infinitive rather than the noun. The present and past participles are overwhelmingly in favour of the 's' form by a factor of over 50 to 1, though the proportion declines somewhat when we distinguish the verbal use of the adjectives from the adjectival. In the present simple the proportion is only 5-1.

(There are also of course plenty of examples of practise used as a noun in British English).

So the matter is not at all simple.

(And of course it is quite Colonel Blimpish to object to an American spelling anyway).

Barbara Partee said,

Geoff, doesn't this warm your heart and make you glad after all that Language Log now includes the comments function? Your post was about idiot prescriptivists, but many of the commenters are thinking about your "proceed at your peril" example and doing linguistics! I think that's neat!

Andy J said,

Geoff Pullum (since he is currently based in the UK) will probably know, but others from across the Atlantic may not, that the phrase "we ignore this at our peril" is much beloved and very overused by a section of London society who might think of themselves as the literati, amongst whom I would certainly number Howard Jacobson. I suspect that he would actually be mortified to think that someone from the lower orders might be familiar enough with this phrase to use it himself. I'm only surprised that the article didn't appear in the Guardian rather than the Independent

Not only do I, like Barbara, just love the comments section but I get this warm and fuzzy feeling from following some of the recent anti-prescriptivist rants and thoughtful posts. The feeling of not being alone, in this world.
Is there a club for those who fight prescriptivism and pedantry?

Also, Justin may be on to something about calques. As a French-speaker, I find "proceed at your peril" to be eerily familiar.

Read this linguistically ignorant blithering windbag at your peril
Ugh: I just did. As to Jacobson's other gripe about the programme –

Watching Phil Beadle spill his guts, drop his aitches, glottal stop, rend his soul, cry a bit, laugh a bit, swear a bit, in general fall over himself not to act or look or sound like someone in authority

– he doesn't seem to grasp that it was excellent psychology. The subjects were working-class people who had bad memories of conventional teachers (i.e. middle-class, RP and authoritarian) so of course it made sense to get someone they wouldn't see as an enemy.

Giusi said,

I am Italian and in Italian we use to say: a tuo rischio e pericolo (at your risk and peril). Since peril definitely comes from Latin (Middle English, from Old French, from Latin perculum. See per-3 in Appendix I), this expression might be a borrowing from that Italian expression.

john riemann soong said,

Is there some Latin-based reason for practice/practise and licence/license, in England? I remember the Latin teacher at school was very proud of taking the local 'off-licence' to task for having misspelt their own trade.

Ray Girvan: Watching Phil Beadle spill his guts, drop his aitches, glottal stop, rend his soul, cry a bit, laugh a bit, swear a bit, in general fall over himself not to act or look or sound like someone in authority… it was excellent psychology. The subjects were working-class people who had bad memories of conventional teachers (i.e. middle-class, RP and authoritarian) so of course it made sense to get someone they wouldn't see as an enemy.

I'm wondering what US linguists (broadly leftish, if I'm not mistaken) think of Britain's class-coded accents? Are they a Bad Thing?

JanetK said,

I wonder if I am alone in this, but I do not really feel any difference between the transitive and the intransitive sense in the lie/lay verb pair. This is also true of some other verb pairs but not all. What harm to meaning would occur if there was just one verb to cover both the case where there is an object other than oneself and the case where there is no object because it is assume to be oneself? Please help me with this unnatural contrast. And..what is the correct verb to use in the phrase, 'now I lay me down to sleep' in the little child's prayer?

@JanetK:
There would be, of course, no harm at all to meaning if the transitive causative lay 'cause to recline' and the stative/inchoative intransitive lie '(come to} recline' stopped being distinguished. We do this uneventfully with open, for instance.

The ablaut distinction between lieand lay (and the parallel ones sit / set and rise / raise, all of which relate irregular inchoatives referring to body motion with regular derived causatives) is old, and therefore venerable to some. It's sacred morphology, like whom or Meā culpā!, and unnatural only to those who don't find history natural. Thus it becomes a badge also of education and social status in the Anglophone world.

In the children's prayer Now I lay me down to sleep, note that there is an object me and the verb is therefore transitive. Thus lay is correct. This is in fact an old reflexive use of the verb, like German Setzen Sie sich, or rural American Set yourself down, often pronounced as Sit yourself down, especially in regions where the [ɪ/ɛ] distinction is weakened.

Nathan Myers said,

How did English come to replace sounds the "k" sound with "s", as in praktik -> practice and (particularly) Caesar "kyzer" -> Caesar "seezer"? Is it just from confusion about how to pronounce the written letter "c"?

It didn't. Latin /k/ (spelled 'C') got replaced with fricatives by palatalization in some contexts much earlier in other languages, and then borrowed into English.
There's a nice summary of answers from Ask-a-Linguist about that here.

Justin L said,

My professor actually used "Caesar" on one of my exams in History of Spanish, because it shows a lot of diachronic processes.
[kaisar]
[kɛsar]-reduction of dipthong
[tʃɛsar]-palatization of initial "k"
[tʃɛzar]-voicing of intervocalic "s"
[tˢɛzar]-fronting of cluster
[tˢezar]-merger of unstressed "e" and "ɛ"
[sezar] (spelled "cesar")-lenition of [tˢ] to [s]
The later steps to give modern Castillian Spanish [θesar] are post-Old Spanish

If [sezar] was borrowed before the Great Vowel Shift, then English would normally have long e>[i] and "ar" would be weakened to "er", giving [size(r )] in Modern English. The restoration of the dipthong is probably English printers/dictionary writers trying to promote the "classical" spelling.

To oversimplify a bit: Classical Latin used the letter "c" to indicate the sound "k". As Latin evolved into the various Romance languages, the pronunciation changed in the cases where "c" was followed by "e" or "i" (or, I'm guessing, "ae", as in Caesar). In Italian this ended up becoming the "ch" sound; in French (and at least some Spanish dialects) this became "s"; as Justin L points out, in Castillian Spanish it eventually ended up as the "th" sound. English basically borrowed the French pronunciations for Latin.

I guess Justin and Alexandre must be quite young and unfamiliar with the French spoken and written before the massive influence of translations from English which has affected contemporary French vocabulary and syntax, first in Canada, but now (even more it seems) in France. The French expressions above with "procéder" are recent calques from English, not the opposite.

I have not lived in France for many years and would never have thought of using "procéder" to mean 'proceed' in the sense of "avancer" – to me it is a word belonging to a formal, legal or administrative style, meaning 'to perform with care and deliberation (esp. something long and difficult)' as in "procéder à une opération" 'to perform an act or operation" (eg in a formal, institutional context, eg in a business or bank, or a police station, or – sometimes humorously – in the context of some perhaps commonplace activity performed with a lot of care and attention, as in "procéder à sa toilette" 'to perform one's grooming activities'). Similarly I would never think of using "à votre loisir", a literal translation of 'at your leisure' – but the two nouns do not mean the same thing. "Avancez à vos risques et périls" is the only one of these expressions that I recognize and might use, to mean "Go ahead if you like, but you only have yourself to blame if something happens to you." Incidentally, I interpret "at your peril" the same way: not that you will get into a dangerous situation, but that you might, so you are warned. Am I wrong about "at your peril"? Doesn't it mean about the same as "at your own risk"?

marie-lucie said,

p.s. more on "procéder": i am not totally happy with my translation 'to perform an act with care and attention'. It is not really wrong, but the verb also carries a connotation that the 'process' or 'procedure' consists of steps to be followed in a certain order, and therefore its performance requires care and attention.